Einstein in a Box

[arbre_rieur]

Here's 7 1/3 pages from THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS 1...



Groves gives Oppenheimer the grand tour of the Manhattan Projects.















After the attack is vanquished...

Comments

[biod]

The robots took one look at Einstein, saw that he was busy, and kindly took themselves apart to save him the trouble.

[cainofdreaming]

Or he might have 'kirked' them - explained "love" mathematically. Blew their tiny robot minds straight out of their metallic skulls.

[biod]

Or simply: "Could you help me with this problem? It's quite tricky"

sorry my brain just choked on something

[lissa_quon]

"ZEN POWERED BY DEATH BUDDHISTS"

ZEN POWERED BY DEATH BUDDHISTS

....DEATH BUDDHISTS

well okay then

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[turtlefu]

I know, it's like, there are clever, esoteric, and crazy ideas.

And then there is just plain old stupid.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[glprime]

Yuuuup.

I remember an exchange from some earlier version of S_D, where another member was incensed by religious humor and asked, "Well if I said a joke about Buddha, how would a Buddhist react?"

He would laugh. And the Buddha would laugh with him.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[filthysize]

This is the former, right?

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[icon_uk]

And Christianity should, by rights, be a religion of acceptance, tolerance and understanding, and yet we got the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Westboro Baptist Church (to name but three classic examples of missing the sodding point)

Never underestimate the human capacity to completely distort a philosophy to suit their own ends.

Death Bhuddists could just be those who got the wrong end of the stick and wish to bring oblivion to as many people as possible by any means.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[venatosapiens]

I won't deny that the absurdity of it is weirdly appealing. Even if Hickman is just throwing words together.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[khamelea]

Wasn't there an I Ching driven robot in the Great Ten?

That just kind of looks like a cruder version of the same kind of combo thinking.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[donnblake]

There have certainly been violent extremist groups that identified themselves with Bhuddism. And specifically during World War Two, a large number of Zen Bhuddist groups supported Japanese military expansionism. Death Bhuddists is certainly an oversimplification of it, but the guy's a military administrator who's also responsible for understanding huge varieties of different mad sciences. Expecting him to be an expert on Bhuddist philosophy beyond "those are the ones who power the Japanese Death Machines," is asking quite a bit.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[sadoeuphemist]

I love that Lone Wolf and Cub arc where he's hired to kill a Buddhist monk, but he just can't kill him. So what he does is, he goes out into the woods and finds an abandoned temple and meditates until he achieves enlightenment.

Then he goes back and cuts the monk in half.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[lascoden]

I love spiritual journeys of self-enlightenment that end with chopping dudes up.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[espanolbot]

Hm, they could probably have used Amatsu-Mikaboshi, the Japanese God of Evil and the Stars. After the War people actually said that the scientists that conducted the human experimentation for the Japanese army (if you'd call dipping people's hands in liquid nitrogen and then smashing them with hammers actual "science") worshipped him somehow.

Hey, if they could say that the Holocaust was part of a blood magic ritual in the comicbook series the Life Eaters, then the above could also have been the case too.

Re: sorry my brain just choked on something

[baihu]

As a Buddhist, if you really look at the philosophy, it's actually pretty morbid. Well, since the aim being to eventually return to nothingness and oblivion as a form of totality and peace, it's got the potential for sounding very fatalistic, if not for the fact it also espouses to make your life worthwhile before you try doing that.

I wasn't fazed by the phrase 'Death Buddhist' honestly, it kinda has a nice ring to it.

[michael_ellis_day]

I'm looking at these pages with all the latest up-to-date tropes being ticked off one by one -- the real-world historical figures, the Morrison-Ellis hyperscience jargon, the secret history of the world, the copious gore with no emotional weight -- and I'm wondering why my instant reaction is "Eh, seen it all before."

And then it hits me: I really just don't like Jonathan Hickman's stuff. I wish I did. I have nothing against him personally. But he leaves me cold.

[biod]

I really like Hickman's work, but I can't seem to get behind this.
I guess if I wanted ultra-science in my WWII with Einstein I'd play some more Red Alert.

[darkknightjrk]

I wouldn't say I hate Hickman's stuff--but I will say that I've so far found his work in the Marvel Universe to be more compelling than some of the creator-owned stuff I read.

[eyz]

Really intrigued in this series :)

[arilou_skiff]

Eh...?

Not really impressed.

[lonewolf23k]

Well of course Einstein could defeat all those Kamikazi Deathbots.

He's trained as a Ninja: http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/1365964.html

[leoboiko]

Somehow I don’t feel battle screams of “shi! shi! shi” very threatening. Should have gone with 抹殺 massatsu or something.

[biod]

Even a repeating bass drone of "ganbare" would be deliciously unsettling.

[halloweenjack]

The feeling that I got from the first excerpt of this comic is only intensified after looking at this stuff; I'm with

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The feeling that I got from the first excerpt of this comic is only intensified after looking at this stuff; I'm with <user=michael_ellis_day> above--there's something sadly pro forma about this. Especially if you read the stories of the real historical people named in this, they're so much more interesting than the one-dimensional super-scientists being caricatured here. You could have trimmed off the sides of the "imaginary weapons" panel and I still would have known that one of them would have been the Spear of Destiny, because it was in Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron and Hellboy.

[darkknightjrk]

Agreed with Michael and halloweenjack on this. When I saw the premise for this book, I couldn't help but think, "...Isn't this just a more contemporary version of what Hickman did with Shield?"

I mean, I've really liked what Hickman did with Fantastic Four, but I think he really needs to do something a little more outside his wheelhouse or risk ending up becoming massively stale.